Government Should Learn From Bitcoin for Future Tax Returns, Says Tech Review

The UK government ought to consider stealing the blockchain distributed encryption thingy for wider use, says a man, a man charged with looking at ways the tedious admin of the future could be streamlined and made more secure.

It's been christened distributed ledger technology by the author of a report commissioned by the government, with the paper explaining that: "The technology could prove to have the capacity to deliver a new kind of trust to a wide range of services. As we have seen open data revolutionise the citizen’s relationship with the state, so may the visibility in these technologies reform our financial markets, supply chains, consumer and business-to-business services, and publicly-held registers."

If that's all a bit complicated, they put together a video explaining how it works using children's play bricks as examples:

Still a bit too complicated, but we think the idea is to use bitcoin-style encryption to manage document transmission when the future you submits a tax return or applies for a passport in the year 2024, with the idea being that a distributed ledger could be "scalable and secure" with the ability to "provide proof of correctness of their contents" -- also leaving an audit trail as proof a thing was done. [Gov via Ars]